Keep it "Short. Simple. Sweet," Brown (Customers for Life
) and Davis, an employee communication consultant, advise business professionals in this cheery but disheartening primer on reaching an American public suffering from "brain overload" and "attention deficit trait." The authors' recommendation: treat every potential reader or viewer like a restless teenager. There's plenty of commonsense advice—keep information easy to digest, break up communications into bite-size bits, directly address consumers' desires and understand your audience. But it's hard not to recoil at the implication that all of today's consumers are scatterbrained or at the authors' impossible suggestion to "love your audience members unreservedly." And no, business professionals can't fake it: their "love has to be real—not manufactured or manipulative—and unconditional." While keeping prose at the recommended seventh-grade level, business people must communicate in an "authentic voice... it should be the real you." Laid out in bullets, sidebars and extra-wide margins, this basic volume is for professionals with as little patience with prose as their target audience. (Oct.)
